Wikitravel:Convenzioni per la nomenclatura degli articoli

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There's lots of places in the world, with lots of names in lots of languages. The following conventions are intended to make it easier to decide how to name articles, and how to read and find things in Wikitravel. Most of the following apply to destinations as well as other kinds of articles.

Use English for place names

This version of Wikitravel is in English (but see language versions of Wikitravel), so article names should be in English. If a place doesn't have a name originally in English — and, let's face it, most don't! — the most common English name should be used. This is true even if a more literal transliteration from the place's native language would look or sound different, or if the destination has an alternative "official" name that is not as common in practice.

Esempi:

• Pechino, non Beijing
• San Pietroburgo, non Leningrado o Санкт-Петербу́рг
• Ginevra, non Genf o Genève
• Città del Messico, non Mexico o Ciudad Mexico
• Tokyo, non Tōkyō o 東京
• Bangkok, non กรุงเทพฯ o Krung Thep

If there are other names for a destination — especially the name in the local language! — by all means include that information in the article itself. For example, an English-speaking traveller to Lisbon should know that it's called Lisboa in Portuguese; they may be interested that it was called Olisipo by the Romans.

For remote or relatively unknown destinations where there just isn't a commonly-used English name, the title should be the most commonly-used name in the local language. For places where the local language doesn't use the English (or Latin) alphabet, try to form a Romanized version. Note that there are few destinations where someone hasn't made an English version of the name; check official tourist information from the local government, dictionaries, encyclopedias, other guidebooks, or other reference material for suggestions.

The guiding principle here is to make the articles easy to find and read for English-speaking users. Use common sense and consensus to resolve naming conflicts, and remember that the traveller comes first.

Romanization

Use only Latin characters for all article names (not just place names). Latin characters are the letters A through Z, capitalized or not, with or without accents or diacritics. Latin characters are much, much easier for English-speaking readers and contributors to "sound out" or to type (say, for the search tool) than non-Latin characters. If using diacritics, please also create redirects (eg. Umea should redirect to Umeå).

See also: Romanization

Hierarchy

The shorter we make our URLs, the easier they are to remember and the more likely people are to pass them around. For place names, the basic name of the place, without a whole bunch of localizing addenda, is the best. In other words, Denver is all you need to find the city of Denver, and not [[Denver, Colorado]] or [[Denver, Colorado, United States of America]]. The place of Denver in the world should be clear from the Denver page, or from the Colorado or even United States of America articles.

Districts

An exception to excluding hierarchy from article names is districts in a city. These have names of the form "Name of city/Name of district". Examples:

• San Francisco/Tenderloin
• London/West End
• Paris/Montmartre

Disambiguation

Sometimes different places have the same name -- for example, the city of Victoria in British Columbia and the state of Victoria in Australia. The rules here are a little complicated, but they go something like this:

1. When the two places are on the same level of the geographical hierarchy, we take the name of the next place up in the hierarchy and add that in parentheses afterwards. Examples: Springfield (Kentucky) and Springfield (Missouri), Victoria (British Columbia) and Victoria (Seychelles). On the very rare occasion that the containing geographical areas of both places also have the same name, then we move up the hierarchy from there, until two different names are found.
2. If the two places are on different levels in the geographical hierarchy and it is not clear which is better known, the name of the geographical unit is used in parentheses after the short name. Examples: Georgia (state) and Georgia (country); New York (city) and New York (state).
3. In a few extremely rare cases it won't be possible to disambiguate places by only using the rules above. If and only if this happens both the name of the geographical unit and the name of the next place up in the hierarchy are used. Example: There are a number of places named Albany. The cities of Albany (New York) and Albany (Georgia) can be disambiguated by rule number 1. But there is both a region and a city called Albany in Western Australia. Hence Albany (region, Western Australia) and Albany (city, Western Australia), since the latter is not the only Albany (city) (rule number 2) nor the only Albany (Western Australia) (rule number 1).
4. As an exception, if one place is so famous that the disambiguation is a hindrance rather than a help, it remains without a disambiguating parenthesized suffix. Examples: Paris is the capital of France, Paris (Texas) is a nice little prairie town in the US. Los Angeles refers to the large metropolitan area in southern California, and Los Angeles (Chile) refers to the mid-sized town south of Santiago. Peru is the country in South America; Peru (Indiana) is a town in the American Midwest.
   • When a place meets the "much more famous" criteria, the non-disambiguated article should include the template {{otheruses}} at the top of the page, which will automatically provide a link to a disambiguation page. For example: Paris uses {{otheruses}} to automatically create a link to Paris (disambiguation).
   • Counties, provinces, and prefectures that contain cities of the same name are common examples of the much-more-famous rule. When a city X and its surrounding region share the same name and the city is much better known, then the city gets "X" and the province goes in "X (province)". Always uplink the city to the province. Examples: Buenos Aires and Buenos Aires (province), Hiroshima and Hiroshima (prefecture), Ayutthaya and Ayutthaya (province).

If there are 3 places or more with the same name, use rule 1 first (for places on the same level of hierarchy) before using rule 2 (for places on a different level of hierarchy).

You can use a single pipe character to hide disambiguators; for example, [[Georgia (state)|]] will be automatically corrected to [[Georgia (state)|Georgia]] and appears as Georgia.

When two places share the same name a disambiguation page should be created. The name of this page should be the common name, for example Georgia, unless one place meets the "much more famous" exception, in which case the disambiguation page should be named "X (disambiguation)" where "X" is the common name (for example Buenos Aires (disambiguation)). Links in other articles that point to the disambiguation page should be redirected to the appropriate disambiguated page.

Capitalization

Most place names are capitalized in English. Short words like "of", "and", and "the" usually are not. So United States of America is the preferred capitalization.

For articles that aren't place names, capitalize the first word, and then don't capitalize things that don't need to be capitalized. For example, Discount airlines in Europe rather than "Discount Airlines In Europe", and Manual of style rather than "Manual of Style".

"The"

If a destination name normally starts with the word "the", leave it off for the article name.

Examples:

• The French Alps
• The Ukraine
• The Grand Canyon
• The Virgin Islands

Exception: The Hague, where "The" is a fixed part of the name.

Abbreviations

Places called Saint or Mount something or other often have the name abbreviated as St. or Mt. something or other or even St or Mt something or other. To avoid confusion and multiple articles, the abbreviation should be avoided and the words spelled out in full, unless the official placename spelling uses the abbreviation.

Also avoid contractions like Turks & Caicos Islands but spell the conjuction too, so the article is named Turks and Caicos Islands.

Separating words

Separate words with a single space character rather than apostrophes, dashes or hyphens, unless the place name is normally spelled that way.

Numbers

Spell numbers out, unless they are actually part of the name. For example, use Eight mile junction instead of 8 mile junction as the number is spelled out on signs, though Route 66 or Highway 2 should be used if the names are normally displayed that way or if the number is routinely displayed on its own.

Non-alphabetic characters

Try to avoid using non-alphabetic characters, even when they are actually part of the name. The following characters should be avoided if possible.

• & - Ampersand: Used in web page address to indicate the parameters of a query string.
• : - Colon: Separates the wiki article namespace from an article name. Should only use with valid name spaces.
• # - Hash or Pound mark: Used in web page address to indicate a section.
• . - Period: Used in web page address to separate domain names.
• ? - Question mark: Used in web page address to indicate the start of a query string.
• ' - Single Quote: Used in HTML to enclose strings. May cause page errors.
• / - Slash: Separates a major page from a sub page.

These and other special characters in article names may produce unexpected results. You could find the article to be unaddressable, unable to be moved easily or pages that link to the article may produce errors.

For example:

• Moving an article with & instead of and in the title is difficult. Coteaus & Plains should be called Coteaus and Plains. But if you try to move the page you will move the Coteaus_ article instead because the & cuts the page name short. To move this article you need to move Coteaus_%26_Plains because %26 is the UTF-8 character code for &.
• Do not title an article * of the Sea when the place is called Star of the Sea. Even when a special character normally appears in the name, thus When to call *555 in New Zealand cannot be linked even though it would be a better than When to call star triple five in New Zealand or When to call star 555 in New Zealand, as the telephone number is written as *555.
• Of course #browns should never be used at the title of an article about Hash browns, as # is used to link to a section heading on a page. In this case the link goes to the Browns section on the page, which doesn't exist.

Section headings

Section headings should follow most of the same formatting conventions as article titles. Section headings should usually come from the appropriate article template for a destination.

Region names

Many regions have local names that work well in the Wikitravel hierarchy, such as the Green Mountains or the Ozarks. In other cases the most common name might use a directional indicator, such as Northeast Ohio; in these cases it is important to remember to use the common name and to avoid the temptation to create a region with a name like "Northeast (Ohio)". In this case, someone visiting Ohio is not going to visit Northeast, they will be visiting Northeast Ohio. Exceptions to this rule include such regions as the Midwest (United States of America); the commonly used name really is the Midwest.